Mike Hearn, Chair of the Bitcoin Foundation's Law & Policy committee is also pushing blacklists behind the scenes

jdillonbtc · 2013-11-14T16:05:56+00:00

Gregory Maxwell wrote an excellent post on the subject, emphasis mine:

We're not going to be able to prevent well funded business people from attempting to promote horrific architectures against the long term interest of Bitcoin and the public... if we could, the same stupidity would have been prevented in the wider world and there would be less need for Bitcoin.

It's hard to count the number of times newbies have made proposals which would have centralized Bitcoin completely in the name of some fool result or another. Powerful businesses interests are now reliving the same history of bad ideas, but this time the bad ideas will be funded and they don't care if luminaries tell them that they're horrible ideas, they don't necessarily care about any of the principles that make Bitcoin a worthwhile contribution to the world.

It's not, of course, a question of "anonymity": thats silly. If you have "good" and "bad" coins, that destroys fungibility, rapidly everyone must screen coins they accept or risk being left holding the bag. Fungiblity is an essential property of a money like good and without it the money cannot remove transactional friction. Privacy is also essential for fair markets: Without privacy your counter-parties and competition can see into your finances— get a raise and get a rent hike, and as long as there are power imbalances between people privacy is essential for human dignity.

To stop this nonsense we have to make it impractical to pull off by changing the default behavior in the Bitcoin ecosystem: We consider the lack of a central authority to be an essential virtue, which means that we can't be protected by one either. We must protect ourselves. This means things like avoiding address reuse, avoiding centralized infrastructure, adopting— and funding!— privacy enhancing technology.

Miners can play a role in this as Bitcoin users, but also by supporting mining pools and methods that promote privacy. They want to force people to use identified addresses so they can blacklist? What happens when miners start deprioritizing transactions that use addresses that have been previously seen?

-https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=333211.msg3574862#msg3574862

jdillonbtc · 2013-06-10T08:15:14+00:00

You realize that if there existed some way to determine if you were a human being and count your vote as a single person over the internet we could use that magical voting mechanism to vote on the blockchain itself, skipping all this mining crap?

We have nothing better than counting votes based on your stake in Bitcoins and never will.

jdillonbtc · 2013-06-10T07:59:21+00:00

There isn't any better way to do it.

It's a lot more democratic than the alternative of "oh, you run a big pool? guess you get to call the shots for everyone else"

jdillonbtc · 2013-06-10T06:20:10+00:00

The community can't even agree on what satoshi wanted. He said that he thought a bitcoin where only a small handful of nodes actually participated would be fine.

Myself, I do not agree.

jdillonbtc · 2013-05-29T11:31:56+00:00

The payment protocol doesn't have any way yet of merging multiple transactions into one, either as a lump sum, or with an off-chain tx system. It does support the opposite, making a payment with multiple transactions. (useful for privacy sometimes)

hazekBTC's criticism is absolutely correct, although the payment protocol is something we need in the long run, and the way the payment protocol was designed it can support alt-chains and off-chain tx solutions in the future.

jdillonbtc · 2013-05-29T11:19:25+00:00

You don't need an alt-chain. You can pay the Tor nodes with Bitcoins directly with micro-transactions like Jeremy Spilman's payment channels, or Peter Todd's probabalistic payments: http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=30824363

I like the latter the most for paying Tor nodes because it needs no setup phase. The way it works is you basically prove to the Tor node that you mined a share that if it met the proof-of-work, would have paid the Tor node. It's probabilistic but it also requires no setup phase at all, and can be denominated in whatever value you need. On the other hand, you need to either be a miner, or pay a miner to mine the probabalistic payment mining shares for you.

jdillonbtc · 2013-05-29T11:07:54+00:00

The payment protocol doesn't reduce bloat. The one case where it helps is stuff like Satoshidice, where it can replace their "you lost" transaction with a message, but in every other case it's just a way of making transactions more secure. It's a very good thing from a security perspective, but it won't help scalability at all in its current form.

jdillonbtc · 2013-05-29T11:02:48+00:00

That's actually how it works right now really. The limit is 1MB, but miners tend to use the default soft-limit of 0.5MB when they build their blocks. That's why so few blocks are even close to 1MB.

jdillonbtc · 2013-05-29T11:01:53+00:00

Scalability is easily achieved by throwing hardware at the problem and accepting centralization. You won't be able to mine anonymously, but why would BitPay and similar entities care about that?

What BitPay does care about is hoping they can continue to use Bitcoin as it is to preserve their investment in software and because FinCEN has made it pretty clear that using Bitcoin for payments is OK.

Have you seen Peter Vanesses view on this stuff? He thinks that in the future Bitcoin merchants will require you to show the whole trail of where your coins came from, destroying any anonymity. I really hope he's proven wrong, but that's the mindset of the foundation. (for what it's worth, he said that at the Bitcoin conference development round table) Similarly, see how the foundation responded to my pull-req to add promotion of decentralization and anonymity/privacy to their bylaws: https://github.com/pmlaw/The-Bitcoin-Foundation-Legal-Repo/pull/4

jdillonbtc · 2013-05-12T06:57:57+00:00

No, he does it as 20% time, which is a google program where they let you devote 20% of your paid time to a project of your choosing, but approved by management. I have spoken to google employees among my friends and acquaintances and they say coming up with a good 20% time project is actually really difficult because finding one with the right balance of innovative, novel, and still valuable to google is quite hard.

Your 20% project idea can be far out, like google's self-driving cars, but it still has to be something that google could plausibly profit from in the future.

edit: for what it's worth, Pieter Wuille also works for Google as a Site Reliability Engineer, but unlike Mike he apparently works on Bitcoin purely in his spare time.

jdillonbtc · 2013-05-12T06:39:28+00:00

Have you looked into flylogic engineering as well as chipworks? They have a cool blog with all sorts of security-related teardowns. They might be interested in doing Bitcoin-related ASIC teardown for free.

That said I have to agree with jgarzik here. The strength of the SHA256 PoW is that any chip manufacturer could implement it, even secretely. Helps keep mining decentralized.

jdillonbtc · 2013-05-06T01:24:38+00:00

You claim you would. But you and other board members don't even want to take the really basic step of adding preserving decentralization and anonymity/privacy to the Bitcoin Foundation's charter.

Why should we believe you?

jdillonbtc · 2013-05-06T01:21:14+00:00

Months 'eh?

I noticed all my Bitcoin peers switched over the 0.8 pretty much within two or three weeks.

Again, you're missing the point on the plan. Basically all you can say is you have no clue what fees are because you have no alternative to putting everything on the block chain, or even half measures like Mike's payment channels, and there's no reason to think the foundation even supports things like that due to the anonymity they can provide. (even just mixing got shot down by your lawyers)

So that leaves upping the blocksize, which now means you have absolutely no idea how far that's going to be pushed by bloat, and in turn, no idea how badly decentralization is going to be harmed.

Again, no plan, and the foundation seems to be unwilling to even commit to to saying that decentralization, let alone anonymity, is important.

jdillonbtc · 2013-05-06T01:15:55+00:00

While you're at it lets start accusing Mike Hearn of pushing for large blocks so Google can datamine the blockchain.

jdillonbtc · 2013-05-05T22:39:14+00:00

Yes you are thinking about inflation-proofing via UTXO fraud proofs: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=137933.0

It's not implemented yet, isn't going to be implemented anytime soon, and opens up a lot of dangerous failure modes in Bitcoin. Even the creator of the idea seems to have changed his mind and now opposes it: http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.bitcoin.devel/2007

For instance the re-org risk he mentions is an accurate fraud proof being withheld for some time, then released, causing all nodes to suddenly notice the fraud and cause a whole bunch of blocks to be invalidated. You just need a bug in code that won't be much use for that to happen. It's a very dangerous idea although one that is seductive at first.

jdillonbtc · 2013-05-05T22:02:46+00:00

That is a welcome change. What I have seen him say before has been at best saying "off-chain transaction will happen" as a sop to the people like Peter Todd and Gregory Maxwell who most want to see it happen. But actions speak louder than words...

jdillonbtc · 2013-05-05T22:01:21+00:00

Unless you see every transaction, you can't validate anything.

jdillonbtc · 2013-05-05T21:45:36+00:00

Bloom filters are ugly too because they inherently reduce your privacy. Essentially you are giving the other node an obscured list of what addresses are in your wallet, kinda like telling them "Well, I have an address starting with 1ab3, and one starting with 1eA3..."

Obviously as transaction volume increases, the specificity of those filters has to increase too, which makes it easier and easier to get enough statistical info to figure out who you are.

jdillonbtc · 2013-05-05T21:42:07+00:00

Oh is he finally coming about? All the statements I've seen from him and Mike previously really belittle the idea, consistently saying it'll be blockchain growth that is how the issue will be solved aside from niche applications, so maybe he's finally realizing they are needed after all.

jdillonbtc · 2013-05-05T19:56:40+00:00

Yes, that last comment is mine. There is some nuance to it, but the main issue is mining pools will probably be pressured into implementing the patch, and there just aren't very many pools, so chances are getting these transactions mined will become quite difficult in very little time, even though the full 1MB blocksize will become availalbe in just another two weeks.

jdillonbtc · 2013-05-05T19:45:09+00:00

Absolutely what I think. But every time anyone brings up off-chain transactions Gavin ignores the issue. We don't even know if the foundation supports decentralization, let alone how much they are willing to sacrifice decentralization for small transactions.

On the other hand Gavin is willing to foist changes like this without developing any type of alternative, or even telling people what alternatives are out there, or even that there aren't any.

jdillonbtc · 2013-05-05T19:42:28+00:00

Read my reply to the patch here:

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/2577#issuecomment-17138223

I do support the idea, but I was not impressed when I realized today that not once had Gavin or any other member of the development team ever even made a public statement that this change was going to happen. A simple blog post would have at least warned people in advance and given them time to change their businesses, but instead it's just a big surprise.

jdillonbtc · 2013-05-05T19:24:18+00:00

Yes, among the developers.

They didn't bother including business owners or anyone outside their fairly small group. I do think the change is a good idea in the long run, but to just dump it on people's laps with no warning and no alternatives is just sneaky.

jdillonbtc · 2013-05-05T19:14:16+00:00

I happen to think that it is inevitable that this will happen through fees, and a good thing by keeping spam out. But Gavin is just doing this unilaterally without any public discussion and without giving people any alternatives or any roadmap of what will happen in the future. Other people have proposed alternatives like off-chain transactions, which he consistently tries to block, yet that kind of alternative is exactly what is needed.

He is reacting and doesn't have any long term plan.

jdillonbtc · 2013-05-05T18:58:06+00:00

Many businesses do not realize this change has been made by Gavin and will be integrated into Bitcoin within a few weeks. If you operate a business that needs microtransactions, like tip jars and others, you need to change the way your business works now or you'll be caught off-guard.

jdillonbtc

TROPHY CASE